Earth benefitted from a dose of cosmic good luck. While it became balmy and habitable, next-door neighbor Venus ended up hellish and inhospitable. And yet, in terms of size, composition, and approximate distance from our host star, Venus could be Earth’s twin—as Earth-like as any extrasolar planet observed so far. So why did Venus suffer its fate? Searching for answers, researchers are seeking to send a new crop of landers to our cloud-shrouded neighbor.

Future missions should facilitate leaps in our understanding of Venus’s chemistry and geology, moving far beyond the findings of the few Venus missions to date. Such missions include the Pioneer Venus Orbiter, which captured this ultraviolet image of Venus's clouds in 1979. Image courtesy of NASA and the NASA Space Science Data Coordinated Archive.

Such missions will not only let researchers understand Venus better but should tell them more about Earth. “Fundamentally, we can’t understand why Earth is Earth without understanding why Venus is Venus,” says David Grinspoon, a Planetary Science Institute astrobiologist based in Washington, DC.

The only operational spacecraft currently orbiting Venus—Japan’s Akatsuki probe, launched in 2010—can study the planet’s atmosphere and climate only from above. Landers can directly measure conditions on the ground as well as during their descent to the planet’s surface. And although orbiters can get an overall sense of Venusian terrain and mineralogy, landers can do a much better job of gleaning fine-scale geological data.

Landing on Venus, though, is not trivial. Its surface temperature is a scorching 872 °F (467 °C), enough to melt lead; the planet’s atmospheric pressure is more than 90 times that of Earth’s at sea level; and the thick air, mainly heat-trapping carbon dioxide, also contains trace amounts of acid-forming sulfur dioxide. As a result, previous probes that reached the surface intact didn’t fare so well—the record-holder …

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